Italian Fascisms Forgotten LGBT Victims: Asylums and Internment, 1922 1943

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This book examines the question of the repression of LGBT people through psychiatry during the fascist regime in Italy, a subject that has not been investigated until now. It draws together the substantial archival record of patients, doctors and fascist authorities to reconstruct intricate behind-the-scenes dialogue, and to document one of the ways in which the regime repressed LGBT lives in this period.

Italian Fascisms Forgotten LGBT Victims focusses on three different psychiatric hospitals in three parts of the country - Rome, Florence and the small Calabrian town of Girifalco, which had different attitudes and therapeutic approaches. Archive research results are contextualised within the psychiatric theory of the time, highlighting the existing discrepancies between theory and daily routine practice of mental health institutions in Italy during the regime.

Using a variety of sources, Gabriella Romano expands current knowledge of the history of Italian psychiatry, and, in doing so, she also touches a number of crucial issues of medical history, history of Fascism and queer history. Most importantly, this original and well-documented study sheds light on the life stories of ordinary LGBT individuals and their families under the fascist regime, a topic that is still mostly unexplored.

Reviews

This important and timely book shows how LGBT people ended up and suffered in psychiatric institutions under Italian fascism. Gabriella Romano describes very vividly how same-sex desiring people and their families, how nurses and doctors navigated between cooperation with and resistance to the repressive system. The books innovative approach makes clear that queer historians need to look not only at penal, but also at medical logics of persecution. It rescues long marginalized voices from oblivion and from being once more silenced by present-day homo- and transphobia. * Benno Gammerl, Professor for History of Gender and Sexuality, European University Institute, Italy *
This study is not focused on the regime [of Fascist Italy's] actions but on its victims, confined, as the title indicates, in asylums and internment. Romano (Univ. of London, UK), a documentarian, has studied the history of homosexuality and of Italian Fascism and concentrates here on psychiatry as practiced with respect to homosexuality at three asylums in Rome, Florence, and Calabria ... This is a rewarding study in the history of psychiatry ... Recommended [for] graduate students, faculty, and professionals. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Gabriella Romano is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an independent documentary filmmaker. Her main area of interest is the history of homosexuality, with a specific focus on the fascist regime years. She is the author of The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy. The Case of G. (2019), which was also published the same year in Italian, and of Il Mio Nome Lucy. Il XX secolo nei ricordi di una transessuale (2009), based on the first interview released by Lucy Salani, MtoF who survived Fascism and deportation to Dachau.